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CALCULATION OF THE FINAL ACUTE VALUE FOR WATER QUALITY CRITERIA FOR AQUATIC ORGANISMS
Citation:
Erickson, R. AND C. Stephan. CALCULATION OF THE FINAL ACUTE VALUE FOR WATER QUALITY CRITERIA FOR AQUATIC ORGANISMS. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., EPA/600/3-88/018 (NTIS PB88214994), 1988.
Description:
The Final Acute Value (FAV) for a material, which is an integral part of the procedure for deriving water quality criteria for aquatic organisms, is an estimate of the fifth percentile of a statistical population represented by the set of Mean Acute Values (MAV) available for the material, a MAV being the concentration of the material that causes a specified level of acute toxicity to aquatic organisms in some taxonomic group. A new procedure for calculating FAVs has been developed under the assumption that sets of MAVs are random samples of such populations. Based on examination of available sets of MAVs, it was inferred that FAV estimation would be best served by assuming that the populations have a log triangular distribution. Also, because this or any other assumption will likely not completely hold over the entire range of data in all sets, it was judged that FAV estimation should be based on subset of the data near the fifth percentile. Major modifications of the new procedure were found to result either in only minor changes in FAVs or in FAVs at variance with the data.